Lazy post!
No extra formatting!
Just need to write things down…
Might do a better write-up later, but for now (especially in the baking heat we’ve been having in southern California this week), I’m much too focused on other things.
Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing (2010) - COMPLETED!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/34190
26 hours playtime (Steam), 17:32:43 playtime (according to the game), 46 of 46 challenges completed – 100%ed the game!
It’s a great alternative to Mario Kart; lots of rubber-banding, but it’s tuned well and still feels like a challenge until you get it down. Once you do get it down, the in-game Challenges truly are a challenge at times, with the Bonanza Bros level being the most evil of them. Checked out videos for that one, and the final challenge (I ran out of patience), as well as tips for a couple of the secret challenges. Very fun, tons of characters, definitely recommended. Shame the console DLC bits and online multi-player never made it to PC.
Dragon’s Lair (1983) - Beaten!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/227380
2 hours playtime, 4 of 12 achievements
Never played this classic title until now, but a friend who grew up in the 80s piqued my interest in it a little over ten years ago. Finally picked it up in the sale and had a ton of fun with it. Lots of people seem to have trouble getting it to work right, and I used the Steam API to download and play the earlier-released version first. Either (old or current new) version runs about the same, but I did like the hinting indicator overlay on the older version better. I haven’t played it in the original style yet where there are no hint arrows/sword on screen to help you out, and I can only imagine just how many kids’ quarters this game ate up back in the day. The main character’s vocalizations, and the sound effects in general, were a surprise bonus of entertainment for me. Fun if you don’t mind repetitive frustration and mostly-smooth-but-not-always gameplay.
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit (2018) - Beaten!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/845070
3 hours playtime, not all of the objectives completed
Love “Life is Strange”, haven’t played “LiS: Before the Storm” yet. Would have liked to see a little more dynamic response to the player’s choices, but I’m always relieved when a work with lots of dialog attempts to have a child as the star and doesn’t fuck it up (I’m looking at you, Phantom Menace). At the end, the way I played it, the square peg story jammed itself into the round hole ending, but prior to that it was very good, with great atmosphere. Looking forward to LiS2, and will finish all of the objectives before playing LiS2. (Game is also oddly graphically intensive, and complains about your system specs.)
Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition (2010) / Street Fighter IV: Ultra (2014) - Beaten!…?
http://store.steampowered.com/app/45760
4 hours playtime, 3 of 67 achievements
Held off on activating my Humble Capcom Bundle key for this for a long time because I hate having incomplete games, and there’s so much weirdness between editions of the same game on Steam (I also have the GFWL version, Street Fighter IV), and so many DLC packages. It helps that development has moved on to SFV at least. Finally read on the Steam forums that you can simply deactivate the “Ultra SFIV Digital Upgrade” DLC on Steam and the game will (redownload and) revert to SFIV:AE. Also read that that particular Humble key activates most of the AE content, as well as the Ultra upgrade. Hmm… and with the current DLC packages, that means I’d need to get “only” the Fantasy/2014 Challengers Pack, and the three Costume/Complete packs: Wild, Horror, and Vacation to have everything. And with the sale, this was all suddenly fairly reasonable price-wise. So long story short: game’s cool, and is probably one of my favorite editions of Street Fighter now, lacking only the slow-motion in-depth tutorials of Skullgirls to make it perfect. Played random characters through the story mode on Easy until I beat it – happened to be using Abel for that. I’m not much of an MP fight game player, but SFIV actually made me think about it, and I did play an online match and did okay.
Steampunk Tower II (2018) - Beaten!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/622460
18 hours playtime, 26 of 30 achievements
It feels very “tower defense” in pacing, although you’re only ever defending one tower with (eventually) up to ten emplacements. The story/English is horrible; truly godawful. (Oh, you betrayed us? Who cares, we trust you now to go spy on the enemy!) But the gameplay… is quite good! I was surprised. You slowly defend cities across nearly all of Europe, gaining new towers and upgrades along the way. The resources are balanced such that you might run short for a little while, but it’s easy to recover. The continually-invading enemy is a hassle, but makes for a better sense of the reality of the war; you don’t just one-and-done a city like it was just a game level. I’m extremely hesitant to make the remark that some of the sound effects sounded too familiar, as most of the game has a reasonably high production value in the art and audio department. The crappy story is my only major complaint, and some of the ways things are worded make it obviously a Russian production, but this doesn’t detract at all from the good balance and gameplay. (Oh, one last complaint: Ireland’s challenge level in particular, and one of the other challenge levels are badly designed, having slightly too great a reliance on randomness.)
The Rockin’ Dead (2013) - COMPLETED!
https://steamdb.info/app/41750/
8 hours playtime, no achievements
It’s bad. It’s a classic point-and-click style adventure game. It’s not on the Steam Store anymore; doesn’t even have a Community Hub. You aren’t missing much. The inventory glut is terrible, half the puzzles are done for no particular reason, the story is stupid, the dialog is crap, the animation is terrible, the 3D models are amateur hour, the voice lines are delivered nearly deadpan, the only depth comes from the 3D glasses that are included in the physical retail version (it has a toggleable blue/red 3D mode), and even the settings menu is needlessly obtuse. Any redeeming qualities? It’s a full game, it’s better than a lot of the trash on Steam these days, and there’s rock chicks (which, as a hetero male who likes that aesthetic is, imho, a good thing). Hints used: plenty. Regrets: none.
Kung Fu Panda Showdown of Legendary Legends (2016) - Beaten!
http://store.steampowered.com/app/369230
The publisher has a habit of removing all of their titles from Steam, so I figured I may as well grab this one during the sale. As a bonus, I apparently don’t have to get any of the DLC… it’s… included… even though it’s also for sale on the Steam Store (don’t buy it!). I never played too much of Smash Bros., but that’s what this is. It’s mostly nice, but… the gameplay could be a lot smoother. Just play Smash Bros., it’s far and away the better game. If you don’t have Smash Bros., this is only worth it if you really really need to scratch that itch, or if you’re just a fan of Kung Fu Panda (I’ve only seen the first one (two?), but I like it well enough that I really did enjoy the game).
Convoy (2015) - Beaten!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/318230
The comparisons with FTL are good. But I enjoyed this more than FTL. Maybe because it was slightly easier. Slightly. Or maybe because of all the references to other properties of which I’m a fan (Firefly, Mad Max, Lord of the Rings, Doctor Who, Star Wars, etc.; there’s a ton of references packed into this game). You have your main vehicle that’s actually mostly helpless, and you have your other vehicles surrounding it, defending it, and dodging the occasional obstacle. Fights are tough at first, but can get a bit easier as long as nothing terrible happens. On the main map, luck is important. It’s unusual to have a long streak of bad luck though. At least, on Easy it was. Make sure to watch your fuel, and stop at camps to repair and upgrade your vehicles. The boss fight seemed unfair the first time I fought it. But (after picking up a good strategy for the latter part of the fight), I was able to beat the boss on my second encounter, although just by the skin of my teeth. Great game if you enjoyed FTL, good game if you weren’t sure about FTL, but were intrigued by it, bad game if you wanted nothing to do with FTL.
Also enjoying!…
The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition (with hair patch); I really thought I’d beaten this long ago… I… don’t think I have though…. And I own a LeChuck t-shirt!
Mass Effect 2; I hate DLC - https://steamcommunity.com/app/24980/discussions/0/846940247828327831/#c2788173147734474995
Mass Effect 1 (re-playing it); I hate OCD…
Mud Runner: A Spintires Game; yep, just like Spintires, but a bit better; don’t know why driving around in the mud is so fun, but it is…
Renowned Explorers: International Society; never followed Total Biscuit, but in memory of his passing, picked up a recommendation; neat game, but haven’t gotten far yet
Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!!; having so much fun with the GF… our restaurant has a guinea pig, cats, a guitar, and a velociraptor on the walls.
Zombie Night Terror; SG win! Really creative play-as-the-zombies game! Enjoying it a lot, but getting the challenges is tough!
Gang Beasts; ehh… play Human Fall Flat for a better time
Skullgirls; back into it due to my gametime on SFIV, definitely wish SFIV had Skullgirls’s training modes
Stick Fight: The Game; would be great if the spawn-a-second-uncontrollable-player-for-a-single-controller BUG (developers in denial that it’s a BUG) was not an issue
Goat Punks; king of the hill… meh… not bad, but there’s much better local MP games
The Club; I have a weird thing where I still want all the GFWL games… (they all still work for me, too; it’s just that you can’t buy DLC for them anymore)
El Tango de la Muerte; SG in! Interesting guitar hero-esque “dancing” game on a grid, but the musical timing prompts just don’t feel predictable enough, a matter of memorization instead of musicality, unfortunately
Sonic All-Stars Racing Transformed; quite possibly better than it’s precursor, but haven’t played a ton of it yet
Hope you enjoyed and/or hated the horrible wall of text! :D
Aw when I read that you had a guinea pig and cats inside of Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! my attention immediately perked up thinking ooh you can have pets and I didn’t realise!!! How!? Then continued on reading. :P Though the paintings are still cool haha, I’ve got a grandma doing a slam dunk in mine. How’s the co-op? Is there story mode together or just versus?
It’s a shame that there’s so many mixed things about Gang Beasts. I’ve seen a bunch of people play it back in the day and always wanted to play with my brothers, but I’ve read so many negative things about it turned me off it.
I don’t really understand your problem with Stick Fight: The Game, is it when trying to add someone else co-op using the same controller? Or single player vsing an AI? Sorry my brain’s really not working rn keep rereading it, is 100% me. I’ve been planning on playing this one co-op very soon as well, thanks. :)
Kudos on playing so many games, hope the rest of the month is filled with good ones! I feel ya on the heatwave, stay cool. :D
Yeah, Gang Beasts probably would’ve been better if I hadn’t played and really enjoyed Human Fall Flat with the GF. And if there were four people playing. With only two, and neither of us particularly competitive (versus cooperative), it made for a kinda drab experience with small bits of “hey, that was kinda neat.”
For Stick Fight (and I notice there’s an update since I last tried it, so… who knows [edit] yep, still buggy [/edit]), the bug is weird. So, there were two of us trying to play against each other, and there are two controllers plugged into my PC, but anytime you press a button on your controller to spawn yourself in, it spawns an additional character… so there’s one you’re in control of, and the other… is just… kinda there. For whatever reason, the game reads the button input as two different controllers pressing a spawn button. But… just for spawning. Neither of us could control the extra two characters, nor were they attached to an AI. So, if we happened to kill each other, and the level wasn’t going to kill the two dummy characters… we had to quit the round. That didn’t happen too often, but it was annoying when it did. Usually we’d just kill the dummies off first. The game was really quite fun otherwise! (Steam Overlay / Big Picture / Steam Controller versus Logitech versus my awesome little 8bitdo N30 Pro didn’t make any difference.)
The co-op in CSD2 is nice. I think the cooperative aspect of CSD1 was sort of better (one person expedites, the other cooks, definitely had to communicate more), but it’s also nice and freeing to have either player be able to do anything. And as we slowly ramp up our difficulty, we do talk to each other a little more, mostly with the Holding Stations so that we don’t end up making the same appetizers and end up not having enough room. I really wish CSD2 had recipe upgrades, but that might be the only thing I truly miss from CSD1. Pets would be awesome though; they could help with the chores! :D As far as I know, the story mode is no different from the single-player story mode, and I don’t believe there’s any sort of versus in CSD2… yet(?). Also, I kinda wish the game wouldn’t occasionally reward you with new dishes… we have one of our presets on random everything! and it’s terrifying when it randomly chooses hoagie sandwiches, cakes, beer, and oysters (the oysters aren’t bad, but the gf is a vegetarian) and those are things we didn’t even buy… well, except the beer. Also also, I recommend using the two different Xbox icon sets for two players; or one person on Xbox and the other on Playstation icons if you can wrap your head around them (I couldn’t). Both icon sets being the same made us accidentally send orders out early and such.
Ahh that makes sense, it’s definitely a party game that thrives on chaos/competitiveness.
That’s so odd about the bug! I’d seen a couple people play and thankfully they didn’t have that problem, so I didn’t realise it was a thing. Fingers crossed we won’t either and that it gets fixed sooner than later, sounds like a pain. Will have to see, we use Xbox controllers.
While in theory I like having new stuff unlocked without having to pay for ‘em, I feel ya about how it can mess with the randomised modes. I did the random achievements early on so I wouldn’t have a problem with it late game. Thanks for the tip re: the icons, that could definitely get confusing. I tried playing with controller during CSD! 1 and was impressed how well it worked, but still found the keyboard much easier..should be interesting trying it out. Thanks for letting me know how it is. :)
The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit’s graphical intensity is quite real. I suppose since it’s short and a free game it’s not optimized as much as LiS? I played LiS with medium settings and it ran smoothly, but I had to turn all to low for this one. The story is kinda neat tho, although I suspect his dad has bipolar disorder or something. lol Or maybe that’s alcohol doing the thingy.
Yeah, I mean… I liked that I left footprints in the snow, but… there’s tons of more casual gamers who’d like to run the game on lower specs, I’m sure!
Bi-polar would actually make a lot of sense. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone, no matter how alcoholic, have that much of a mood swing while still remaining coherent. :) Also, for most of the game I was kinda hoping Max was the kid’s mom. Would’ve made a nice connection to the original LiS while simultaneously adding millions of new questions.
Max being his mother would be such a cool setting! :o Also what is with the ending? Does he actually have powers or what? Imagine if Max is his mother and it’s a gene thing to have supernatural powers. That would be so cool. x3
I love how you say its lazy then write a page worth of stuff
writing the stuff takes me forever formatting is quick and simple in comparison
That was my first thought as well haha.
While I’m not super quick at formatting, thinking of what to say is definitely what turns me off writing reviews when I’m tired/lazy and can take foreeever. :P Colour me impressed.
Welllll, I had a rough layout of the Sonic review sitting in a browser tab for at least two weeks, but the rest was just off-the-cuff today dumping it out of my head so I can use the space for something else (not really, brains don’t work that way… …do they?).
Formatting means having to go grab images and image URLs and keep clicking Preview and consider placements and selections of screenshots and italicize things and bold things and link things and collapse things and think about other things and get beaten/completed colors and look up how much each of these cost me and where they came from and add these all to my main profile page here, and… so much easier to just throw up a bunch of text. :)
If I used one of the awesome auto-formatters, that would probably help, but then it’d still feel like a “real” post and I’d over-analyze it.
I guess I used to take ages on posts doing all of that
recently I’ve just been writing it using the markup syntax cause stuff like discord has made *this* super fast and then inspecting element and copying all the source code to get the formaty stuff in tags and make it different colors with a few seconds of a online color wheel to find a color I like
although even when I was trying to find pictures and endlessly mess around with getting stuff to align and format and all that I still took more time trying to figure out what to say
qudo’s to it being easier for you I guess.